A host may comprise a plurality of virtual machines deployed in a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (“VDI”) environment. The virtual machines may use similar operating systems and applications. These commonalities may present I/O performance and redundancy challenges. For example, when a large number of the virtual machines boot, the virtual machines may accesses a similar files stored on similar storage systems, which can result in creating a “boot storm” that can overwhelm I/O resources. Moreover, the I/O may result in caching multiple, duplicative copies of the files in cache storage, resulting in reduced cache availability and wasted cache resources.